When rich women built houses

How did ladies spend their time when married to extremely rich men in an era before television, speed-dating and summer festivals? You build a dolls' house (a "dollhouse" if you are American). These incredibly detailed miniature houses and interiors were constructed between the 17th and the early 20th century, mostly by wealthy ladies who often paid artists and craftsmen to make all kinds of objects and parts for them.

Some of these dolls' houses took more than 20 years to build and ended up being just as expensive as real houses. Aside from their picturesque charm, they are a historical record of upper-class daily life in earlier times, before the invention of photography.

The most famous is the Queen Mary's dolls' house (more pictures here, here and below), built from 1920 to 1924 by Sir Edwin Lutyens for the English Queen. The house includes real plumbing infrastructure (you can flush the toilet), the books contain the exact written text of their larger counterparts, and the bottles in the wine cellar have wine in them.

The Art Institute of Chicago has an online gallery of 68 miniature rooms, all built in the 1930s and showing interiors starting from the 13th century up until the decade they were built (see picture below).